The heat production of contracting muscle has been studied for a century. If the accumulated knowledge is to continue to play a part in ideas of contractility, interpretation in terms of specific chemical reactions is needed. This type of understanding of muscle heat requires three kinds of measurements: of the heat and work (h + w, Joules) produced by the living muscle; of the amounts (η, moles) of each of the n chemical reactions thought to be occurring in significant net quantity; and of the enthalpy change (ΔH, Joules per mole) for each of these. Armed with all these results we can then use the following statement of the first law of thermodynamics to test whether our list of reactions is complete.
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R. C. Woledge (1973) studied this question.